Monday, April 30, 2007

The worst thing about Washington is ....

There's no Tim Horton's.

Everybody drinks Starbucks coffee. I don't like Starbucks and even if I did I have no idea how to order one. They seem to speak a different language. Whatever happened to "small," "medium,"and "large?"

Incidentally, the price of coffee is like the price of hotel rooms. It's outrageous but that doesn't seem to stop anyone from buying.

21 comments:

The caption for the photo should be "baaaaaah" (or however you like to spell the sound that sheep make.

We have "Java Jives" here in NC, and while they are still expensive, AT LEAST all of their coffee is fair trade and organic, AND they (hold onto your hats) hire people from all different age groups (*gasp* old people can make coffee, who knew?!)! Oh, and their trucks run on biodeisal. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Starbucks!

I don't know why so many people have such a hate-on for Starbucks. I quite like the taste of their coffee, but of course they also have some odd and some unpleasant features. Yes, the prices are high. Yes, they're a large corporation (with which some people assume 100% correlation with Evil).

As for the names - don't worry about it. The bored, brainwashed unemployed actor behind the counter will understand regulation English just fine - ask for a "medium coffee" and she'll ask "dark or mild?". Flip a coin if you can't decide, the two varieties are really not very different. Then you have to add your own sugar / cream / whatever, unlike the Tim Horton's system of telling them how much of what you want.

To avoid confusion, just ignore the masses of people willing to pay $4.50 for steamed milk and diluted espresso produced using a $4500 machine. They do speak an odd dialect, but they're generally harmless.

"As for the names - don't worry about it. The bored, brainwashed unemployed actor behind the counter will understand regulation English just fine"

Not so. My wife has twice (once with me) walked out of a Starbucks after attempting to order in English and being jumped through their idiot hoop. They really would not accept small, medium, or large as an order.

I spent a lot of time in Canada (mostly Edmonton, a bit in Calgary and Toronto) in the early '90s. Rough equivalent of Tim Horton's is Dunkin' Donuts - not so much for the donuts, but folks are crazy about their coffee. You might want to check whether there's one nearby to satisfy your caffeine cravings.

"Anyway, I've found it rather amusing that "tall" is what they call "small."

As you probably have heard, condoms come in three sizes: Large, Extra Large, and Oh My God!

As for our experiences, one of the offending Starbucks was on the Ohio Toll Road, and the other in a heavily student dominated area in Ann Arbor.

My favorite, now defunct, coffee place served a six-shot wakeup drink, costing about 4 bucks at the time. I was in Royal Oak after a last-minute 24-hour push to deliver a theater set, and stopped by a Starbucks. I described what I was after to the counter guy, who entered it into his register, and came up with a price of over 10 dollars.

"Anyway, I've found it rather amusing that "tall" is what they call "small."

There actually is a 'short'... which once was the small... still is, I guess, insofar as it's their smallest cup outside their espresso cups. It's just not much mentioned.

And re Starbucks' coffee: honestly, I'm not a hater--even carry one of their little card thingies I occasionally top up, do buy coffee there, now and then (among other places, including Timmy's)... They do have the advantage of availability (including, as Larry notes, in DC, where I lived a few years), and there's one in my neighbourhood I frequent enough they know my order...

But, that said, Starbucks' coffee isn't, to my judgement, really so great. They really do overroast their regular coffees ('light' roast there is still pretty smokey, dark is three quarters of the way to charcoal), and their lattes/capuccinos are extremely milky compared against just about anyone else's unless you ask them to add an extra demitasse (or two) of espresso... And as to their espresso, it's actually quite good in some places, but really uneven between outlets... Some do quite consistently decent stuff, some regularly wreck it in this particular way... it gets this rancid taste which I suspect might have something to do with their not cleaning their machines much or well. There was a place in Pentagon City (DC burbs, just over the Potomac on the VA side) I remember as being really, *really* bad that way... Couldn't walk past it without wrinkling my nose, smell of something rotten near the espresso machines.

Good alternative in Ottawa is Bridgehead: their espresso's got a lot more bite, it's even a bit much in a latte, they way they mix them, but nice on its own. And they're fair trade.

I often run in to a Bucks--convenience--for a large Verona, black, to go. I always say "large." The cashier--er, barista--never flinches. Of course, here in New England, their competition is Dunkin Donuts.

Drinking Starbucks is like drinking any other dark roast- akin to drinking from an ashtray. And now Safeway has installed Starbucks in all their locations. Bleah. Why roast all that good caffeine out of the beans? I always thought that was the point of a coffee buzz...

For those that have not had the pleasure of enjoying a Tim Horton's coffee (i.e., those that are mostly likely to not know the meaning of the term 'double-double'), my heart bleeds for you.

Everyone here has commented on taste, price, communication, etc but only a few of you have talked about what I think is the most important consideration about buying coffee; is it ethical? Coffee farmers are the worst treated labourers in the world. Wouldn't we all enjoy our coffee a lot more if we knew that the people who grew the coffee beans were treated and paid fairly for their work?

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Principles of Biochemistry 5th edition

Disclaimer

Some readers of this blog may be under the impression that my personal opinions represent the official position of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Medicine, or the Department of Biochemistry. All of these institutions, plus every single one of my colleagues, students, friends, and relatives, want you to know that I do not speak for them. You should also know that they don't speak for me.

Superstition

Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerlyseemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.

Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

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I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.

The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.

Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.

The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.

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My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.